by Rex Pickett
“I didn’t say, ‘Here’s a thousand dollars, sugar, go fuck my friend,’” Jack said. “It didn’t go down like that. I did not pay her to seduce you. I just told her that you liked assertive women.”
He kept his eyes welded on mine to prove his sincerity. His defense, at first unconvincing, slowly began to gain some merit in its unfolding, and I felt myself, against my will, beginning to soften.
“How was the wine?” he asked meekly.
“Rapturous,” I grudgingly admitted. “Beyond words.”
“See. It all worked out.”
I straightened my bone-weary body from the bed, drifted over to the window, and parted the curtains. Sunlight streamed into the room; another chamber-of-commerce morning in Buellton. I squinted against the glaring light. Then I gave a backward glance to Brad’s Remington and wondered mordantly if it was still loaded.
Jack rose cumbrously from the chair. He still had the blood-soaked towel pressed to his nose and it occurred to me that he might be seriously hurt. “I think you broke it, man.” He grimaced.
“Sorry,” I murmured. “Sorry.”
He hobbled into the bathroom with heavy footfalls. A moment later I heard the shower hiss to life. I lay down on the bed and waited for him to finish up so we could figure out what to do with the long day stretching ahead of us. Maya’s fragrance lingered on the pillow and I inhaled it over and over, hoping it would sear itself indelibly in my memory.
When Jack finished his shower and had dressed, his nose was still bleeding. Against his objections, I chauffeured him back to Lompoc Hospital. We didn’t talk a whole lot—hangovers, betrayals, hurt feelings—on the short trip west down 246. As we approached Lompoc, a dense marine layer had trundled in off the cold ocean and dimmed the sun, transforming the surrounding topography into a featureless gray.
“Any messages from last night?” Jack finally spoke.
I shook my head.
“That’s weird.”
“What?”
“That means Babs hasn’t called in over twenty-four hours.”
“Maybe she’s backing off. Letting you have your little last hurrah.”
He frowned and shook his head.
“Are you worried?”
Jack shrugged. But I could tell by his expression that he was.
In Lompoc, a mostly cheerless town sprinkled with cheap Mexican restaurants and minimalls with American franchises, ad nauseum, I remembered the way to the hospital without needing directions. Inside the emergency
“You guys are becoming frequent flyers,” he joked.
I chuckled, but Jack didn’t crack a smile.
“So, what happened to your nose?” the doctor asked, pointing at Jack’s swollen schnoz.
“I ran into a door,” Jack lied. “Think I might have broken it.”
The doctor narrowed his eyes skeptically and gave Jack’s nose a cursory look. Then he reached a hand up and pressed it gently with his index finger. Evidently not gently enough because Jack leapt back, yelping in pain. “Hey, come on, Doc.”
“I think you’re right. It may be broken. Let’s get you down to radiology and get a CT Scan.”
The intern led a reluctant, shambling Jack down a drab green corridor. I retreated into the same fluorescent-lit waiting room I had haunted two days before and found a seat. Directly across from me, a young couple was sitting together gripping and regripping each other’s hands. The girl was sniffling and the boy was attempting to console her by imploring her to pray with him. I bent forward and rooted around in the out-of-date magazines on the coffee table, searching for the issue that had featured the self-esteem test I had taken on our previous visit. After a night with Maya I was eager to see if I had gone up—or fallen down—a notch. I couldn’t find it, but I did happen across my horoscope for the month. It read: “Remember those times when you looked and felt like a million dollars—and had the self-assurance to know it? Although this year has been turbulent, Venus and Mars (the passion
I decided this was an auspicious time to check for messages, so I crossed the waiting room to the pay phone, praying my glory days were about to begin.
“You—have—no—new—messages,” intoned the electronic voice. I hung up, wondering if I was projecting mournfulness into the uninflected voice or if Panasonic deliberately made him sound that way. And why not a charming female voice? Have her reply cheerily: “No messages, but I’m sure there are some on the way. Hang in there, Miles, your glory days are coming!”
An hour later, Jack came back to the waiting room wearing thick surgical tape over his nose and his nostrils packed with gauze. He wouldn’t have looked so comical were it not for the fact that the tape was crosshatched to his face. The discoloration of his eyes only added to the comical effect. His look dared me to laugh at him. I brought a hand to my mouth to muzzle myself. Then, finally unable to maintain my composure, I started snickering through my nose. Jack turned his back on me and marched toward the exit.
Back in the 4Runner I turned over the engine and let it idle for a moment. I turned to Jack, who was staring morosely into space. “Two X-rays in two days. You’ve got to be radioactive, Jackson.”
After a few minutes, he turned his head slowly toward me. Close up, he looked monstrous. “Drive,” he ordered.
“So, what’s the verdict?”
“Deviated septum,” he answered sullenly.
I pointed to the tape. “And that … is going to fix it?” Laughter engulfed me and I lost it for a moment and I had to bend over the steering wheel for support.
“No,” Jack said calmly. “It’s precautionary.”
“I’m not going to punch you again,” I blurted through snorts of laughter.
“I appreciate that, Miles,” Jack noted. “I appreciate that.”
I shifted the 4Runner into reverse and started to back out of the parking lot. “So, what are they planning to do?”
Jack, unable to contain himself any longer, slammed his fist on the dash and thundered: “After the wedding I’m going to have to see an ENT and have it set! Either that or end up with a nose like fucking Gérard Depardieu!” His face was tomato red, his eyes apocalyptically wide, and the hair on his head spiked skyward.
I steered onto the main drag and headed out of town, suppressing retorts like “Vive le France” and “What about Jimmy Durante?” Jack attempted to don his sunglasses but he had difficulty getting the frame to rest on the bridge of his now-colossal nose. He finally got them settled, the shades protruding from his face so he resembled some kind of human arachnid. After a moment, his gaze swung slowly over to me. I returned his look. There was a slight delay, then the floodgates opened and I lost myself in another paroxysm of eye-watering laughter. Jack, maintaining his cool, flipped the visor down and studied himself in the makeup mirror. Then—slowly at first—he, too, began laughing. It was really all there was left to do.
We needed some way to kill the afternoon, but Jack didn’t feel like hitting more wineries with his grotesque nose bandage, so we decided to head over to La Purisima for a friendly round of golf—“No bets this time,” Jack announced—since we were more likely to be on our own out there. Jack wasn’t sure his fractured rib could tolerate his savage swing, but he wanted to give it a try.
We pulled into La Purisima and lugged our bags out. While I paid the green fees and cart rental—the least I could do—Jack loaded up on beverages at the snack bar, desperately in search of an attitude adjustment.
Hindered by his injury, Jack’s normally ferocious swing became the flailing of a caveman clubbing his dinner to death. After four painful holes and a succession of worm burners that deflated his spirits, Jack decided his rib was hurting too much to continue. He retired to the cart, happily resigned to chugging Firestone Ales and watching me finish out the round. The wind was up, the marine layer had retreated under the hot sun, and the sky was once again bright and azure. One didn’t need to be playing to appreciate the scenery.
“I’m sorry I punched you,”
I said sincerely as we carted down the humpbacked sixth fairway.
“I didn’t think you had it in you,” Jack said, two Firestones into recovery and beginning to regain his sense of humor.
“I think the last time I actually hit someone was in fourth grade,” I said. “I was really steaming mad, I have to admit.”
“I understand,” Jack said conciliatorily, “but I just can’t believe that chick told you and gave you the money back. Doesn’t make sense.” He shook his head, bewildered. Then, as if a light had popped on in his foggy brain, he peered intently at me. “Did you say anything to her?”
“No,” I lied. Under the circumstances, I didn’t think it was the right moment to disclose that I’d spilled the beans about the wedding.
“Well, something must have ticked her off that she would give you the thousand back,” he said suspiciously.
“Maybe she thought the sex was so dynamite she didn’t
“Now I know you’re lying,” Jack said, twisting the cap off his third beer and taking a long pull.
“Maybe she gave me the money because you told her I was broke and needed it.”
“Fuck, Homes, why would I say that, huh?”
“Well, you told her I hadn’t been laid since my divorce. Which isn’t true, by the way.”
Jack hung his head guiltily. He brooded for a moment, then reached for his beer and took a healthy swig.
I checked my yardage book out of habit, but I wasn’t really thinking about the distance to the green. “I mean, why would you say such a thing to a woman you barely know? That pisses me off more than your giving her a grand to open a couple of great bottles and seduce me.”
Jack remained frozen in silence.
“Because you wanted her to feel sorry for me, right? Isn’t that it?”
“Hit your shot,” Jack barked.
“So, she gave me a mercy pop, but her conscience got the better of her. How would you feel, apprised of such a thing? Huh?”
“She likes you, man,” Jack said halfheartedly. “That’s why she returned the money. She realized it was going to come out eventually, so she gave the money up because it didn’t feel right.”
“Why wouldn’t she just give it back to you and keep the whole thing quiet? If she genuinely cared about me, she might have spared my feelings.” Jack didn’t respond. Of course he wasn’t privy to the true source of Maya’s wrath. “And you wonder why your nose is broken!”
Suddenly, a ball thudded against the grass directly behind us, kangarooed forward, landed inside the cart, and ricocheted around inside it, making several sharp reports like gunshots.
“What the fuck?” Jack said, leaping out of the cart.
I whirled around. Back on the tee box, a foursome of two couples could be made out. One of the men in the foursome was waving his driver over his head and shouting in our direction: “Get the lead out, would you?”
“Fucker hit into us,” I said to Jack in disbelief.
Jack cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled, “Hey, asshole, that wasn’t cool!”
“Throw me his ball,” I said to Jack.
Jack retrieved the trespasser’s ball and tossed it over the cart to where I was standing. I pushed it around with the head of my club until it was teed up nicely on a tuft of grass. Then, without a practice swing, I took a beastly cut at it with my 3-wood, aiming straight in their direction. I flushed it, and the ball took off low and stayed low with the flat deadly trajectory of a cruse missile.
“Great shot, Homes!” Jack exclaimed, applauding.
The foursome, hearing the thwock of metal on Surlyn, took cover behind their carts as the ball whistled over their heads. Jack slapped his knee and laughed. The two men, irate, jumped into one of the carts and sped in our direction to exact revenge.
Jack, quickly rising to the challenge, jerked an iron from his bag and started slashing the air with it like a swashbuckler. “Oh, this is going to be fun,” he sang. “This is going to be fun.”
The cart slowed some fifty yards from us. Jack started to advance on it, brandishing the iron with the fury of a bouncer wielding a baseball bat on a bad night. After getting
Jack sprinted after the retreating cart in a crazy zigzag course, shaking the iron at them like an enraged shepherd with his crook. “Hit into us again, motherfucker, and I’ll rape your wife!”
Jack returned to our cart. He was feeling good about his success in chasing the two guys off. Neither one of us could stop laughing. Maybe we’d be able to move beyond the whole Maya and Terra mess after all, I thought.
Jack got into the beers on the back nine. I wasn’t playing particularly well, but I didn’t really care. Jack seemed to have completely forgiven me for punching him that morning. I think he had reached the conclusion that he had more or less deserved it, even if, as he pointed out, a more prudent target would have been his jaw.
“I wasn’t aiming for your nose,” I said, as we putted up the fifteenth fairway, the sun lowering in a churning fog bank ahead of us. “It was just one of those wild punches born of anger and lack of sleep.”
“I understand,” he said, his speech slightly garbled by the ales. “I’m not blaming you. In fact, I think it’s brought us closer together in some strange fucked-up way.”
Although I tended to laugh at his beer-blurred observations, I reined myself in for once. Underneath his words some honest emotion resonated. So, when he held up his hand and said, “Give me five, brother,” I clasped it in mine and let him grip it tightly, pull me toward him, and shake our hands close to our faces as if he were forging a blood pact. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“You deserved it,” I said, pointing at his broken nose.
“I know,” he said mournfully. “I fucked up.”
“Forget about it.”
He smiled and let go of my hand.
We finished out the round, loaded up our clubs, and headed back to Buellton. The sun now had been swallowed by the fog bank and the highway was cloaked in a fine gray mist. We debated the night’s plan. Terra and Maya were obviously out, the movies seemed like a boring compromise, so we decided, at Jack’s suggestion, to spend a quiet evening at a new, pricey restaurant in Santa Ynez and uncork the ’82 Latour: Jack’s idea of burying the hatchet.
“Are you sure you want to pop it?” I asked. “You don’t have to.”
“Absolutely. Fuck it. It’s the last chance I’m going to have to drink it with you for a while and you’re the one who said it was … what?”
“On the declivity.”
“Right. Losing its fruit,” he mocked.
“It is my duty as someone semi-knowledgeable about wine to inform you that you can probably get over a grand for that bottle.”
Jack swiped the air with his hand. “I don’t give a shit. Besides, I like Cabs better than Pinots.” I turned and he met my look. “We’re not the same,” he said.
“Amen.”
We were laughing about the crazy bachelor week when I arced into the parking lot at the Windmill Inn. As we rounded the corner leading to the rear of the motel, Jack suddenly tensed. He bent forward and stared out the window, horrified. “Oh, fuck!” he said. “Go. Just go.”
“What?”
“Go! Just fucking go!” he said in a frantic voice, both
I pushed my foot down hard on the accelerator. Jack kept his gaze fixed on our room as we sped past it. I steered around to the opposite side of the motel, found a parking spot in front of the Clubhouse, and killed the engine. Jack was breathing heavily; he looked almost frantic. “What’s up? What was that all about?”
He turned slowly toward me, his eyes filled with foreboding. “That’s Terra’s fucking red Cherokee parked in front of our room.”
“What?”
“She’s in the fucking room, man!”
“So? Maybe she’s lying naked in bed, waiting for you.” Jack weighed this possibility for a brief moment. “Did you say anything to Maya last night?”
“No,” I lied again.
“What’s she doing in the fucking room, then?”
“How do you know it’s her car?”
“It’s her car. Who else has a ‘Got Wine?’ bumper sticker?”
“Oh.” I pretended to consider for a moment. “Remember the first night we got up here, we told Charlie at the Hitching Post that you were getting married? Maybe he blew your cover.”
“That’s right,” Jack recalled. “Fuck.” He turned to me for advice. “What’re we going to do?”
“Just go over there,” I suggested as though it were no big deal.
“That’s easy for you to say.”
“In that case, I’ll say it again: Just go over there. Take your medicine like a man.”
Jack pointed angrily at his nose bandage. “I’ve been
“You probably gave her a key, Jason.”
He jerked his head and glared. “No, I didn’t.” He pointed a finger at me. “And don’t start calling me Jason or I’m going to use that Latour for fucking mouthwash.”
“It’d be easy to get into the room,” I reasoned. “Everybody knows everybody around here.”
Jack drew a deep breath and heaved a sigh. “Fuck, man.” He drummed his hands nervously on his thighs.
“Fuck.”
“I need a shower,” I grumbled to push him along.
“I’m thinking. I’m thinking.” He flipped down the visor and regarded himself in the mirror. It was obvious he didn’t like what stared back at him. “Fuck, man, I can’t let her see me like this.” With one swift move, he stripped off the bandage, screaming, “Ow. Jesus. Shit. Shit.” He examined himself again. His nose and the area surrounding it had turned a hideous yellowish purple.
“Do you want me to tag along, or do you want to handle this solo?” I asked.
“No, come with me.”
“All right, let’s get this over with.”
We climbed out of the 4Runner and walked toward our room. Jack was moving haltingly, and I kept bumping into him from behind.
“She misses you, man,” I teased, as we approached the stairs.
“Yeah, right,” Jack said. “Something is definitely weird.”
We mounted the stairs and started cautiously upward, not particularly eager to reach our destination. “You probably
